Contributed talk in Philosophy, Language, Art & Education 3, Aug. 2, 2019, 4 p.m. in room USB.G.003

The Effects of Individual and Social Learning on the Evolution of Cognitive and Communicative Aspects of Language Abilities

Hiroto Yonenoh, Reiji Suzuki, Takaya Arita

watch Publication There are two sorts of primary abilities of human language. One is a cognitive ability or capacity of thoughts (e.g., hierarchical structures of language). The other is a communicative ability (e.g., intention sharing). Our purpose is to clarify how cognitive and communicative abilities of language can evolve in terms of the co-evolution of linguistic abilities, based on individual and social learning. For this purpose, we constructed an abstract model in which the fitness of cognitive and communicative abilities of language is determined by intra and inter individual interactions among traits related to sub-faculties of language respectively, with assuming the following three learning conditions: “No learning condition”, where individuals can use with only the initial traits; “Individual learning condition”, where individuals perform individual learning only; and “Both learning condition”, individuals can choose either individual or social learning. As a result, we found that roles of individual and social learning can work complementally and contribute to the evolution of co-creative aspect of linguistic abilities. It is also implied that the stable evolutionary process of cognitive abilities is based on repeated occurrences of the Baldwin effect and dynamic and less assimilated evolution of communicative traits can work together, contributing to the co-creative communication.